The man who wasn't there

The election in two weeks will confirm Vladimir Putin as the most powerful Russian leader since Stalin. Yet five years ago he was just another faceless KGB apparatchik ... Nick Paton Walsh traces the remarkable rise of a president without a past

In the end, the fate of Leningrad - and perhaps even Russia - came down to a single telephone call. It was August 1991 and the people had taken to the streets to protest against an attempt by hardliners to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachov and put an end to the sweeping changes being brought about by his perestroika. The exchange between Anatoli Sobchak, council head of the Leningrad Soviet, and the local KGB chief, General Kurkov, was brief and formal, yet by the end of it, the two men had cut a deal that would keep blood off the streets of Leningrad and stop the city from falling back into the authoritarian abyss that had characterised it for the past 74 years.

The deal was uncomplicated. Leningrad avoided bloodshed at a cost - the KGB was given assurance that its future was secure in what was to come.

The phone call was arranged by a young aide in Sobchak's staff who was also, conveniently, still a KGB officer at the time. The Observer has learnt that the aide was Vladimir Putin.

The Russian leader's role in Leningrad's 1991 crisis set the political tone for his life and defined the subtle methods behind his ascent to the presidency. Putin: the backroom fixer and negotiator. It was he who orchestrated a deal between the old and the new, in which democracy would appear to come to Russia, yet leave the KGB - the essence and muscle of the Soviet machine - unharmed.

His personal account of his life elliptically says that he was 'on leave' during most of the 1991 crisis, so the incident itself has become a metaphor for Putin's past. Officially, it never happened. He was not there.

When Vladimir Putin inevitably wins the forthcoming presidential elections on 14 March, he will become perhaps the most powerful Russian leader since Stalin. But, in 1999, when the surly 51-year-old first crept into office he seemed to come from nowhere. Three years earlier he'd been a jobsworth clerk shuffling papers in an obscure part of the Kremlin. Yet as he approaches his second term in office, we still know only who he has become in the eyes of a nation, not who he was before he found power. Somewhere between Putin's calm walk down the Kremlin's red carpet at his inauguration in May 2000 and his second presidential mandate four years on, Russia has conjured from the shadowy despair of the collapse of Communism and the corruption and violence of the Nineties, an iconic figurehead. Putin is a cipher, a spectre that has become a fairytale leader without vice, fear, or personal history, a figure dreamt up by a troubled society, still recovering from years of dictatorship.

Among ordinary Russians he is staggeringly popular, with an 80 per cent approval rating in the polls. Pictures of him appear in offices; he has been the adored hero of thriller novels, pop songs, puritanical youth movements, and even theme restaurants. Honorary plaques adorn buildings which he only visited for a matter of hours.

Putin has tapped into a historical and popular tradition for a strong, unflinching Russian leader, yet many fear that as his control tightens, so does the noose around the country's already limited freedoms. Is Russia entering a period of stability, reform and the rule of law, or is Putin turning it, as one analyst put it recently, back into a 'police regime armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons'?

The president is so assured of victory in March (most of his opponents are jailed or politically neutered) he has not even bothered to publish a manifesto. Not since the Fifties has power in Russia been so concentrated in the hands of one man. Yet after four years, Russians are still left looking for answers to the question: who is Putin?

The Mercedes cuts through the grey slush of an icy St Petersburg evening, sheltering the driver from the Baltic chill. At the wheel is Anatoli Rakhlin, a small, neat man, his silver hair forming a sparse laurel around his bald crown. He is the closest thing to a mentor the Russian president has. He brings the car to a halt outside the offices of a company running an oil and gas pipeline and, in the wet snow, stands nostalgically on the pavement of Baskov Pereulok.

'I used to live here, at No 21', he says, pointing to the uniform pre-revolutionary architecture that adorns every St Petersburg street, 'and Putin lived there.' He leads me through the archway at No 12 and into the courtyard where Vladimir - then known as Vova by his childhood friends - grew up.

Putin was born to a working-class family on 7 October 1952 in Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then named). Only eight years earlier, the siege of the city by the Nazis had claimed 800,000 lives and led to Putin's elder brother dying of diphtheria.

'We were kids on the street,' recalls a university friend, Vladimir Yakovlev. 'We got into fights. If you did not practice sport you became a hooligan or got into dodgy company and ended up God knows where. You just wanted to defend yourself.'

Rakhlin leads me up five flights of unlit stairs to the musty passageway where flat No 12 used to be. Rakhlin was Putin's judo teacher from the age of 12 and still trains with him several times a year. He explains how Putin became very committed to judo, travelling for an hour across town to the gym where he held training sessions. He thrived on the discipline and strength of the sport. Rakhlin recalls how his parents were at first not happy about him spending so much time in training, so he went to see them.

'It was an old house with a dirty entrance,' says Rakhlin. 'The three Putins lived in one room of a kommunalka [a large flat for Soviet families]. But the room was immaculate. His parents were very simple people - workers [his father was a machine-tool operator], as was true of the majority of the boys who came to our school. I calmed their fears about his devotion to judo.'

Putin, Rakhlin remembers 'was very thorough, disciplined and cultured. He has the type of character that I prefer - very calm, cold-blooded and a clever intellectual fighter.' He adds, with the admiration typical of those close to Putin: 'As a fighter he feared no one. He would fight 100kg men, and as a footballer he ran straight at the opposition.'

Judo also taught him to play on his opponent's mistakes - to seize upon a moment of weakness. 'He was very good at changing his grip,' says Rakhlin. 'It was difficult to guess where he would throw you. His favourite moves were the leg sweep and the shoulder throw.'

At school, Putin remained unremarkable. Tamara Stelmajova was his social history teacher at the No 281 grammar school. Her first impression was that, 'He was a very serious boy.' Classmates sought his help with their homework and Putin took on the role of class 'polit-informer', an official position that meant he had to make a weekly presentation to his classmates on global and domestic politics. Today, the school is captivated by its star pupil, its walls lined with portraits.

Putin spent his summers travelling with Rakhlin between sporting competitions in holiday camps across the idyllic St Petersburg countryside, the team sleeping in railway stations when they were not offered a room or tent. But Putin's thoughts were already tracing his future. 'When he was 16 or 17,' Rakhlin says, 'he decided that his life would be in espionage.' His mind was set.

In the Sixties, Russia's spy fever was in full swing. Yakovlev remembers that 'there were a lot of books about the secret services. The job of being a spy was very popular. It was about fighting fascism - not capitalism. His favourite film was [the spy flick] The Sword and Shield.'

Putin's infatuation with the fictional Johan Weiss, the Soviet take on James Bond, soon became a reality. After studying law at university, Putin left St Petersburg in 1979 to join the KGB's higher school in Moscow. His authorised biography, First Person, conjures up a glamorous vision of his years as a Soviet agent, recalling how he and his fellow agents burned their papers as the Berlin Wall fell, fearing their sources may be exposed.

Yet late last year another account of Putin's life, by the Prague-based businessman Vladimir Usoltsev, who was a colleague of Putin's during his posting in Dresden, has painted a credibly human picture of a rather average spy. According to him, Putin's German was good, but not flawless as his idolisers claim. He had a fondness for naff pop music which he liked to hum, and he often browsed through West German mail-order catalogues, coveting the fruits of the capitalist system across the border. His dislike of ineffective Soviet bureaucracy led him and Usoltsev to celebrate with two bottles of Czechoslovakian 'champagne' when the old-school Soviet leader Chernenko died.

Putin recruited spies from among the foreign students at Dresden's Technical University, and met with them in his car on the moors around the city. One KGB asset, an East German policeman, called Rainer M by Usoltsev, helped Putin recruit Latin American students, and was consequently treated 'like a family member' by Putin. Rainer M was arrested and charged with espionage when the German Democratic Republic collapsed. Yakovlev recalls how Putin was deeply affected by this. 'He was disappointed when the Soviet Empire collapsed. His bosses left Germany and the Stasi totally unprotected. They [the KGB and Stasi] had been like brothers and nothing was done to help them. Putin felt bad about that.'

Usoltsev goes on to write: 'Putin had an amazing gift to charm people, particularly elderly people.' It is a gift still intact today. Witness the ease with which he ingratiated himself with George Bush. After the leaders met, Bush said he'd looked into Putin's eyes, and his soul, and 'liked what he saw'. A diplomat who translated for Putin, told me: 'He is intensely charming.' She paused before adding: 'He's quite sexy, actually.'

This talent for ingratiating himself with his older superiors led him to the top of the Kremlin. The exact reasons and timing of Putin's departure from the KGB are unclear. Putin maintains he left in 1991 for ideological reasons and thought about being a cab driver before joining Sobchak's administration. Yakovlev told me Putin left because the KGB was no longer the proud, righteous institution he had joined. Another version, offered by Usoltsev, maintains that Putin's work with Sobchak was simply a secret KGB mission.

All the same, Anatoli Sobchak soon found himself with an able and keen aide for his post-revolution role as the rector of the St Petersburg university law faculty. As Valeri Musin, a long-serving member of the faculty admits, both at the university and later when Sobchak was elected mayor in August 1991: 'Putin was Sobchak's right-hand man. To a great extent he was the decision maker. People would approach him first. He had a lot of information and he knew how to handle it.'

Putin rose with Sobchak through Yeltsin's turbulent and bloody Nineties. St Petersburg - as Sobchak renamed the city - was awash with mob wars and contract killings. Sobchak's administration was not immune to the rivers of dirty money around it, and its top two officials were both tarred by allegations of misconduct. Putin held an advisory position on the board of the property company SPAG, the St Petersburg branch of which has been investigated by German prosecutors for allegedly laundering £11m for Russian organised crime. SPAG denies the allegations. Documents show Putin retained this position until March 2000. However, the Kremlin deny that Putin was ever associated with the firm.

When Sobchak fell out with Boris Yeltsin, the Kremlin saw to it that the mayor's more unscrupulous deals were publicised. In the malleable Russian media, Sobchak was accused of giving a St Petersburg firm the rights to a luxury apartment block in the city in exchange for a flat in the same block. Sobchak then bought an apartment in upmarket Moika Street and was accused of trying to annex the neighbouring flat, using the firm's money. He left to live in France before any of the investigations against him led to arrest, and died in 2000 of a heart attack. Putin remained loyal to Sobchak until he lost the 1996 mayoral elections.

Word spread of Putin's skills to high-ranking officials in Moscow who called him there to work for the federal government. But his period in local government had done little to shake his espionage roots. A parliamentary aide said: 'He used to say that in his KGB days their main methods were "bribery, blackmail and murder". Then there was a long pause, before he would add: "Only joking."'

Once in Moscow, Putin's charm and espionage background were put to use exploiting the hierarchy and secret loyalties that thrive behind the Kremlin's thick walls. In March 1997, Putin was summoned to his first posting inside the Kremlin. Putin says in his biography that his links with the KGB and army aided this rise, and candidly admits the chaos of the time catalysed his promotions. Over the past six to 10 years, he explains, 'the Moscow elite had been destroying each other', creating a vacuum of talent. These vacancies, combined with Putin's loyalty, led Yeltsin in May 1998 to grant Putin the key post of deputy chief of staff.

Even at this level, he managed to keep his profile low, his personality unremarkable. Yet his charms and loyalty clearly cut through Yeltsin's haze of vodka and paranoia. By July 1998, the president had developed so profound a trust in Putin as to appoint him director of the organisation he feared most: the FSB (the renamed KGB).

Putin's initial plans for the organisation soothed Yeltsin. He promised massive personnel cuts, and maintained the FSB did not need to regain the control of the border guards and government listening services that had made it such a feared behemoth in Soviet times. Putin was hailed for dragging the FSB away from its dark past and modernising it to fight organised crime, corruption and terrorism.

By this time the Kremlin was in tatters. Yeltsin's health was poor: he would later admit to suffering five heart attacks during his time in office. Washington was pointing the finger at his inner circle over disappeared billions in International Monetary Fund loans. Yet even these mounting problems did not signal Yeltsin's remarkable announcement in August 2000. Yeltsin proclaimed he would soon be resigning from office after nine years in power and that he wanted a man who had thus far been without a public face, Vladimir Putin, to succeed him. For good measure, he made Putin prime minister. In response to Yeltsin's expression of 'confidence', Putin said he had not been planning to run for president, but was accustomed to obeying orders. Forever the KGB officer in the face of democracy, he said: 'We are military men and we will implement the decision that has been made.'

Putin's vertical rise can only have one explanation. In the Kremlin, Putin had found in the drunken, doddering Yeltsin, yet another man in need of a strong, reliable deputy, and made himself indispensable. Beset by health problems and the threat of impeachment, Yeltsin, needed the guarantee of a safe exit. Putin obliged. His first decree as acting president was to grant Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. The move would let Yeltsin grow old in peace, but left little doubt that Putin knew what he needed protecting from.

Putin, as acting president, launched a second military campaign in Chechnya in reaction to a series of bombings across Russia which he had blamed on Chechen rebels. This tough response ensured he won a handsome election victory in March 2000. He had become head of the Kremlin, less than three years after he first set foot in the seat of Russian power.

As with his rise to power, Putin tends as president to move quickly once he has secured some key confidences. In the last three months of 2003, he removed three key obstacles to his grip on power. In early October, he installed the loyal Chechen Akhmed Kadyrov as president of Chechnya through an election that was held under martial law, and both Washington and the EU said was highly dubious. The responsibility for the province's ongoing bloody mess is now Kadyrov's, and Moscow can say it has no right to interfere with the work of an elected official.

On 23 October, Putin began his assault on the other key threat to the Kremlin - big business. The oligarchs - the clique of men who run Russia on the back of fortunes amassed during the privatisation of state assets in the Nineties - had struck a deal with Putin in the early days of his presidency. They would not interfere in politics; he would not interfere in how they made their fortunes. Yet one oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, broke the pact, heavily funding opposition parties and hinting at his presidential ambitions. Prosecutors began sniffing around his company and arresting his associates. Khodorkovsky challenged Putin to arrest him or back off. Exactly two weeks later, he was arrested at gunpoint as his plane refuelled on an icy Siberian runway and charged with tax evasion. He has since been in jail and the company he used to head, Yukos, is in tatters.

Putin promised worried Western investors that no other oligarchs would follow. Last month, government watchdogs began sniffing around Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich. One analyst for a Western bank said: 'Nobody thinks that Khodorkovsky will be the last.'

This action removes anyone with the clout to interfere with Putin's future rule, but also goes down well with a public furious at the men they think stole the country's wealth. Many Russians may have enjoyed a smile when they heard that billionaire Khodorkovsky spent New Year's Eve in the cells of Matrosskaya Tishina jail without a drop of alcohol, and only an hour's extra television in celebration.

The consolidation of Putin's power seemed to reach a peak in December, when parliamentary elections made his control complete. A Kremlin-led campaign of intimidation against independent media ensured that self-censorship and state-run media gave opposition parties little voice.

Since the Dubrovka theatre siege, the media had been put on a tight leash. NTV, the channel that gripped the world with its no-holes barred coverage of the siege, was carpeted by Putin personally, who said it had nearly jeopardised the storming of the theatre by broadcasting live footage of the assault troops going in and the grizzly aftermath when rescuers dumped gassed theatregoers in buses. The Kremlin called media leaders together to make a 'pact' on sensible coverage of terrorism. As if to add muscle to the agreement, the head of NTV soon lost his job.

A complex system of loyalties and ownership keeps the media on message. While the first two channels are state-run and lead most news bulletins with an anodyne run-down of the president's daily business, NTV is controlled by Russian gas giant Gazprom, which is in turn controlled by the Kremlin. Gazprom bought a huge stake in the channel when it was at its peak, providing highly critical frontline coverage of the second Chechen war. It rapidly toned down its coverage.

The rest of the media, which is mostly owned by sympathetic oligarchs, knows the rules. As a journalist at a respected Russian daily told me: 'Self-censorship is everywhere. There are some topics that you just don't touch.'

Washington said it shared the concerns of international observers who condemned the media coverage around the vote as hugely biased towards the Kremlin. Bruce George, head of the observers, said at the time: 'Every media outlet was attacking all the opposition parties. The constant pressure was very subtle but very effective.' The Kremlin's confidence in a massive victory was exposed when Putin admitted he had been up all election night - not fretting about the results, but tending to his dog, which had just had puppies.

So where does Russia go now? In two weeks' time, Putin will face six opponents. Yet none are his main liberal, Communist or libertarian challengers - they have all dropped out claiming that the Kremlin's stranglehold on the media and parliament has tilted the playing field. In fact, only two openly say they want to win. The others want the votes they receive to show Putin - who is expected to get a 70 per cent majority - that their policies are popular. Not that there is anything to compare them to.

'We are all baffled,' a journalist told me. 'Nobody has any an idea what the Kremlin's game plan is. And the longer we wait, the more we begin to think that there is no game plan - just the pursuit of more and more power.' Talk of a police state is premature, but the FSB is fast becoming the omnipotent ogre of the Soviet era. In March last year, Putin did the very thing he promised Yeltsin he would not do, he signed a decree giving the FSB control of the borders and listening services.

Putin has made no secret of his desire to wield absolute power to the benefit of the Russian state in the same way that the 18th-century reformist monarch Peter the Great did. In Tsarist times, when a Russian found himself in a desperate plight, the direct intervention of the monarch became their final chance. It was common for them to pour all their last efforts into a letter to the Kremlin. Tellingly, today the same trend has again emerged. Whether it is the head of the Communist Party protesting election abuses, Bridget Bardot begging for animals to be given better treatment, or a pensioner asking that her flat not be demolished, Putin now gets a plea, in the belief, comforting to the millions of Russia's dispossessed, that there is now one man - and one man alone - who can help.

Last year, a bright spark had the idea of collating these appeals and publishing a newspaper called Letters to the President. It was, of course, banned.